31/03/08

Seeking panelists for the LASSNET conference who would want to contribute a paper for a panel on either 1) aspects of governance of contemporary Family Law in India or 2) laws relating to sexual violence or domestic violence, and their adjudication. Since there is still some time before the conference submission deadline, I've left these topics deliberately broad and vague so that we may define our common focus together.

I am presently working on Family Courts, Women's Grievance Cells and Mediation Counseling, based on data in Kolkata. I am an Associate Professor of Gender & Women's Studies (and affiliated with Anthropology) at the University of Kentucky, Lexington, in the US.Srimati Basu

Press Statement : Bhopal Survivors Arrive on Foot to Remind PM of Unkept Promises28 MARCH, 2008. NEW DELHI – Marking two years since their last padayatra from Bhopal to Delhi, 50 people, including survivors of the 1984 gas tragedy, their children, people exposed to contaminated drinking water and their supporters, today concluded their second 800 km march by walking from Nizamuddin park to Jantar Mantar. "We were forced to undertake this grueling walk because the PM failed to keep his word. This time, we are not going back until we get a public declaration from him that he will deliver on his promise," said Hazra Bee, a survivor and one of the padayatris.

The PMO has rejected a request for an appointment with the PM, and two further requests have not elicited a reply. However, international support for the survivors is pouring in. More than 1300 faxes from 18 countries have already reached the PMO, prompting officials there to threaten survivors with legal action. Yesterday, members of the Scottish parliament marched to the Indian High Commission in Edinburgh, even as other Bhopal supporters in London went to the High Commission there to submit a memorandum urging the Prime Minister to meet the Bhopalis' demands.

On April 16, 2006, the Prime Minister ended a 21day strike, including a 6-day hunger strike by the Bhopalis, by promising to meet the demands of the survivors. The survivors had demanded an empowered Commission to implement social, medical and economic rehabilitation schemes for survivors and their children, in addition to cleaning up Union Carbide's toxic wastes, providing clean water to water-affected communities, and taking legal action against Dow Chemical and Union Carbide. However, the PM suggested a Coordinating Committee to oversee implementation of rehabilitation schemes and environmental remediation.

Over the last two years, the Coordination Committee has had three meetings and accomplished nothing. More than 25,000 people continue to consume poison-tainted groundwater in the absence of reliable and good quality water supply. More than 5000 tons of toxic wastes remain buried and spread in and around the factory site, and no efforts have been taken to contain them or export them to the US for final disposal. No rehabilitation schemes have been implemented.

Government inaction on rehabilitation and environmental remediation has placed Bhopalis at the receiving end of two disasters – the 1984 gas leak and the ongoing water contamination -- both with pronounced effects on children and future generations. Despite a 1991 Supreme Court order directing the Government to extend insurance benefits to 100,000 gas-affected children, not one child has been covered, leading to a spurt in destitution among families with sick children. In contamination-affected communities, congenital deformities among newborns is a rising trend.

The future generations are in danger. That, say Bhopal survivors, is why any Commission that is set up has to execute its schemes over at least 30 years. The Bhopalis estimate that the Government needs to invest in a corpus of Rs. 2000 crore to provide an annual budget of Rs. 100 crores for the Commission throughout its term.

In contrast to the inaction on Bhopal, the Government has, in the last two years, openly advanced the cause of Dow Chemical and Union Carbide. Information unearthed from the PMO through RTI indicates that ambassador Ronen Sen, Montek Singh Ahluwalia, Ratan Tata, P. Chidambaram and Kamalnath have all written letters supporting Dow Chemical. In response, the Cabinet Secretary has suggested exonerating Dow Chemical keeping in mind the scope of investments by Dow and other US companies in India.

In less than a decade, Dow Chemical has chalked up an impressive list of violations of law and due process. In February 2007, Dow caught for paying more than Rs. 80 lakhs in bribes to Indian agriculture ministry officials to register three toxic pesticides. In 2005, Indian Oil revoked a technology deal with Dow after it found out that Dow was trying to sell Union Carbide's technology by lying that it was its own. Recently, Dow has managed to convince Government of India to approve the sale of Union Carbide's technology to Reliance Industries despite the fact that a 1992 court order directs the Government to confiscate all Union Carbide's assets in India.

"This is a repeat of the betrayal of 1989 where the Government colluded with Union Carbide to shortchange the people of Bhopal on the compensation settlement," said Satinath Sarangi, another padayatri and a long-time Bhopal activist from Bhopal Group for Information and Action. "23,000 people have died, and the collusion still continues. We're determined to break this corporate-Government nexus that plays havoc with people's lives."

from Saheli Women: saheliwomen@gmail.comDear friends,Please see the statement below that we have issued to the press.We are also planning to do a protest in Central Park (Connaught Place, NewDelhi) on Wednesday 2nd April, 6 pm onwards. Do join us so we can raise our voices together against these incidents of violence and moralistic reactions of the society, the media and the state. The statement below will be distributed in the form of a leaflet. If you would like to endorse it, please let us know latest by 1st April.

Women's group condemns moralism by the Judiciary, State and Media in cases of rape. In case after case of sexual violence against women we are witnessing troubling trends within the judiciary, state machinery and the media which raise serious concerns for women's safety and hope for justice. In a Sessions Court in Delhi, Additional Sessions Judge, A.K Mendiratta passed a judgment on 18 February 2008, regarding the rape and subsequent forced marriage of a young girl. A student of Class 9, the victim was lured by her friend's brother to his house and raped. When she threatened to file a case, he confined her until his parents returned, whereupon shewas forcibly married to her rapist. Then the judgment states, "under pressure, her father left her at the house of the accused wherein she was subsequently sexually assaulted by the accused Vikas". Finally, the victim was abandoned while she was pregnant. It was only then that criminal proceedings began. 2 years later, the victim took back her testimony and the accused was acquitted.Despite being aware of the horrific facts of the case, in his judgment ASJ Mendiratta fails to recognise what the victim must have suffered, choosinginstead to describe her now as, "married… and blessed with a child". Healso fails to deal with the crimes by accused or his parents, and instead shockingly issues a "warning" to parents, advising they "monitor" theirdaughters to avoid such a "slip in teenage" in our "opening society".We strongly object to the language and tenor of this judgement that seeks to police women instead of prevent or punish crimes against them. This is particularly ironic, given that the Union Home Minister, Shivraj Patil told the Lok Sabha last week that about 75% of rapes happen within the family.Such moralism has been equally evident in the case of the rape and murderof British tourist, 15 year old Scarlette Eden Keeling, in Goa. Stateofficials and the police have victimised the family with constantspeculations on the 'character' of Scarlette and her mother, FionaMackeown. On one hand, have been threats to never allow the family to re-enter India, and on the other hand, bland reassurances regarding the 'safety of all tourists' in Goa. Clearly, the real concern is to protect the tourism industry at the cost of justice. It is only after immense pressure that the Chief Minister, Digamber Kamat has finally agreed toallow a CBI enquiry into the matter. Also of great concern has been some of the regressive media coverage around the incident (especially on TV), marked by voyeuristic speculationsabout the mental state, habits, sexual life, etc. of the victim...building up towards a moral response that the victim 'deserved it'. Media reports and state officials have also systematically targeted Fiona as anirresponsible mother and hence tried to shift the onus off the perpetrators of the crime. Under such circumstances, the possibility of justice gets severely compromised. It is essential that the Government of Goa ensure a fair trial and punishment for those responsible for the rapeand murder of Scarlette.Both these cases are an urgent reminder that we need to examine the waycrimes against women are dealt with by the state, judiciary, media andsociety as a whole. We stand in solidarity with the struggles of victims,as well as those like Fiona Mackeown, fighting for justice under suchhostile circumstances.

29/03/08

Dr. Samia Bano is a lecturer in Family Law at the University of Reading. She obtained her PhD at the University of Warwick, Department of Law where her doctoral research explored the relationship between ‘Muslim Family Law and South Asian Muslim Women in Britain’ (Sept 2005). Her research interests include, gender, migration, human rights and the law. She has worked on a number of research and policy initiatives in the area of gender, migration, multiculturalism and the law, most recently contributing to the CIMEL/INTERIGHTS project to develop legal strategies to combat ‘crimes of honour.’ Her current work explores the relationship between informal religious legal systems, state law and gender relations within South Asian Muslim communities in the UK and is due to be published as a book in Spring 2009 (Palgrave MacMillan).

28/03/08

Dr Gill (B.A., M.A., PhD (University of Essex)) PGCHE) is a Senior Lecturer in Criminology at the University of Roehampton. Her main areas of interest and research are health and criminal justice responses to violence against Black and Minority Ethnic (BME) women in the United Kingdom. She has been involved in addressing the problem of violence against women for the past decade. She is currently the Chair of Newham Asian Women’s Project, London, a management committee member of Imkaan (a second-tier national VAW charity) and a member of Liberty’s Project Advisory Group and their ‘End Violence Against Women’ group (EVAW). Dr. Gill has also served on numerous government committees dealing with so-called ‘honour’ killings and forced marriages, and has challenged politicians to be more inclusive of BME women's voices in policy-making on issues of gender-based violence and human rights. Her current research interests focus on rights and marriage, familial homicide and femicide, trafficking, missing women and violence. She has also published widely in refereed journals.

27/03/08

Arudra Burra is a PhD candidate in Philosophy at Princeton University, and has a JD from the Yale Law School.His philosophical interests are in moral and political philosophy,broadly speaking: his dissertation is on the relationship betweenexploitation, coercion, and consent.Though the dissertation touches on a number of legal themes, Arudra's main area of interest vis-a-vis the law is in South Asian legal history, particularly around the period of Indian independence in 1947. He also volunteers as webmaster of the Right to Food Campaign, India (www.righttofoodindia.org), which is currently involved in a Public Interest Litigation in the Supreme Court of India

21/03/08

Dear allUnder the theme ‘Terror, Law and Bio-politics’ I would like to organise a panel on ‘extra-ordinary/ anti-terror’ laws. We can explore the content and substance of such laws, the politics and ideology which informs the framing and working of extraordinary laws (viz., the specific ways in which such laws unfold), the relationship between specific constitutionalisms (viz., Nepali, Sri Lankan, Bangladeshi, Pakistani, Indian, Israeli, South African, Australian, USA etc.) and extraordinary laws, examining the relations between socio-cultural communities and state as they are mediated through extra-ordinary laws, the specific ways through which people support, negotiate and resist these laws. We can frame our papers around the broad theme ‘Politics, ideology and extraordinary laws’.

19/03/08

Ratna Kapur is the Director of the Centre for Feminist Legal Research, New Delhi, and on the Faculty of the Geneva School of Diplomacy and International Relations. She is also a part of the Global Law Faculty at NYU School of Law. She is currently on mission as the Senior Gender Advisor for the United Nations Mission in Nepal, during the period of the constitutent assembly elections. She has written and published extensively on law from a postcolonial, feminist legal theory perspective. She has focussed specifically on international and human rights laws. She has held chairs and been a fellow at a large number of law schools around the world, including Harvard Law School, Georgetown University Law Centre, Dalhousie Law School, Zurich University, National Law School of India University, and the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies, Geneva. She teaches courses on feminist legal theory, constitutional law, international law, and human rights law.

Kapur is the author of several books, including Erotic Justice: Law and the New Politics fo Postcolonialism (Cavendish, 2005), Secularism's Last Sigh? Hindutva and the (Mis) Rule of Law, (co-authored) (Oxford University Press, reprint, 2001), Subversive Sites: Feminist Engagements with Law (Sage, 1999). Her latest book Alien Insurrections: Gender, Migration and Law is forthcoming from Routledge in 2008.

She has contributed articles to several edited collections and also published extensively in law school journals. Her most recent articles include "Human Rights Impact of Anti-Trafficking Laws: A Case Study of India", in Collateral Damage, (Global Alliance Against the Trafficking of Women: Bangkok, 2007);"Migrant Women and the Legal Politics of Anti-Trafficking Interventions" in Human Trafficking Chapter 5 (Edward Newman and Jyoti Sanghera, eds., United Nations University, forthcoming, 2007); "Challenging the liberal subject: Law and Gender Justice in South Asia " in Gender Citizenship and Development 116-170 (Maitrayee Mukhopadhyay, ed., IDRC and Zubaan: New Delhi, 2007); "Faith and the Good Liberal: Construction of Female Subjectivity in Anti-Trafficking Discourse" in Sexuality and the Law: Feminist Engagements (Vanessa Munro and Carl Stychin, eds, Cavendish:London, 2007);"The Prurient Postcolonial: The Legal Regulation of Sexual Speech in India in The Phobic and the Erotic: The Politics of Sexualities in Contemporary India (Brinda Bose and Subhabrata Bhattacharya, eds., Seagaull: New York, 2006);"Speaking from the Margins: The Legal Regulation of Sexuality in Postcolonial India, in Gender Justice in India : A Reader (in Karen Gabriel, ed., Katha: Delhi, 2005); Revisioning the Role of Law in Women's Human Rights Struggles in The Legalisation of Human Rights, (S. Mekled-Garcia, ed., Routledge: London, 2005);"Citizen and the Migrant: Postcolonial Anxieties, Law and the Politics of Inclusion/Exclusion" Theoretical Inquiries (Tel Aviv University) (2007); "Normalizing Violence: Transnational Justice and the Gujarat Riots" 15:3 Columbia Journal of Gender and Human Rights 885-927 (2006); "Dark Times for Liberal Intellectual Thought", 11 Professions Modern Language Association Journal, 22-32 (2006); "Human Rights in the 21st Century: Taking a Walk on the Dark Side", 28:4 Sydney Law Review 665-687 (2006); "Travel Plans: Border Crossings and the Transnational Migrant Subject" in 18 Harvard Human Rights Journal 85 (2005);"The Legal Regulation of the Family in a Transnational World", Proceedings of the Ninety-Sixth Annual Meeting of the American Society of International Law, 198 (2003) ;"Un-veiling Women's Rights in the `War on Terror'", in special issue on Gender and War, 9 Duke Journal on Gender, Law and Policy 211 (Summer, 2002) (partly reproduced in Human Rights and the Global Marketplace: Economic, Social, and Cultural Dimensions, a textbook by Jeanne M. Woods & Hope Lewis, 2005);"Collateral Damage: Sacrificing Legitimacy in the Search for Justice", 24:1 Harvard International Review 42 (Spring 2002);"The Tragedy of Victimization Rhetoric: Implications for International Women's Rights and Post-Colonial Feminist Legal Politics", 15 Harvard Human Rights Journal, 1 (Spring, 2002) (partly reproduced in Human Rights and the Global Marketplace: Economic, Social, and Cultural Dimensions, a textbook by Jeanne M. Woods & Hope Lewis, 2005).

Daniela Berti is a social anthropologist working on North India, and a researchfellow at the National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS, Paris).Her PhD (1997) was focused on the linguistic interactions which takeplace during possession rituals and on what gives effectiveness tothis particular type of utterance. Other work has covered thedevelopment of divine iconography, local representations of the ritualefficacy, the persistence in contemporary state institutions of politico-ritual roles and practices associated in the past withkingship. In 2002-2005 she coordinated a research programmefinanced by the CNRS entitled The Cultural Entrenchment of Hindutva.Local Mediations and Forms of Resistance. She is editing (with N. Jaoul)a volume related to this project which will be published by Pearsons. She is currently working on a project focused on the ethnography oftrial proceedings in Indian District Courts. She carried out my firstpreliminary fieldwork for this project in November 2006, when she a District and Session Judge's Court in a small town inHimachal Pradesh. She is especially working on criminal cases (drugstrafficking and cultivation, dowry cases or sexual harassments), withthe intention of analysing how two opposing versions of facts arebuilt up during the trial: how the examination and cross-examinationof the witnesses are held, how statements are put into written form;how juridical proof is produced; how lawyers defend their case duringthe 'arguments'

16/03/08

Dear Lassnet members,Please write for Contributions to Indian Sociology. We are keen to carry articles on law and society in South Asia. I notice that several of you work on other interesting issues too. We look forward to lots of interesting submissions in the new year. With regardsNandini Sundar (Co-editor CIS) cisjournal@yahoo.co.in

From: regulation-bounces@listserver.cc.huji.ac.il on behalf of Michael Hantke DomasSent: Wed 3/5/2008 9:02 PMTo: regulation@listserver.cc.huji.ac.ilSubject: [Regulation] Position announcement: Senior Research Fellow in WaterServices RegulationHi all,The UNESCO Centre for Water Law, Policy and Science, is currently looking for a Senior Research Fellow in Water Services Regulation. Applications are invited for a person with expertise in law and economics to investigate the legal issues surrounding the economic regulation of water utilities at a national scale within the global context.For more information, please visit http://www.jobs.dundee.ac.uk/vacancies/20080331_00001-y.htmlThe closing date is 31 March 2008Kind regardsDr Michael Hantke-Domas

Shamnad Basheer is a research associate at the Oxford Intellectual PropertyResearch Center. Till recently, he had been the Frank H Marks VisitingAssociate Professor of Intellectual Property Law at the George WashingtonUniversity law school. He is also the founder of SpicyIP, a blog dedicatedto analyzing IP and innovation policy news and cases from India.He graduated from India¹s premier law school, the National law school ofIndia University, Bangalore. He then joined Anand and Anand, a leadingintellectual property law firm in New Delhi, and worked on a variety ofcontentious and non contentious IP matters before being called upon to headthe firm¹s IT and Telecommunications law division. India. Whilst inpractice, the IFLR 1000 guide rated him as an upcoming, leading technologylawyer. Shamnad went on to do his post-graduate studies at the University ofOxford. He completed the BCL (as a Shell Centenary scholar) with distinction; his thesis dealing with biotechnology and patent law in Indiawas awarded the second prize in a writing contest held by the Stanford Technology Law Review. He is currently reading for the DPhil (PhD) as aWellcome Trust scholar.In the past, he has been an invited research fellow at the Institute of Intellectual Property (IIP), Tokyo, an International Bar Association (IBA)scholar and an Inter Pacific Bar Association (IPBA) scholar. He has alsobeen an editor of the Oxford Commonwealth Law Journal (OUCLJ) and a foundingmember of EDIP (Electronic Database of Intellectual Property). His research interests include patents and developing countries and the interface between patents and antitrust. He has spoken on these themes at various conferencesand also published papers in leading technology journals such as IPQ(Intellectual Property Quarterly), EIPR (European Intellectual Property LawReview) and JILP (Journal of law technology and policy).

14/03/08

Marc Galanter is the John and Rylla Bosshard Professor of Law and South Asian Studies at the University of Wisconsin - Madison and LSE Centennial Professor at the London School of Economics and Political Science.http://marcgalanter.net/This website provides access to his studies of lawyers, litigation, legal culture and other topics, as well as some biographical information and commentary on his work and its reception.

13/03/08

Centre for International Legal Studies, School of International Studies, JNUcordially invites you to a talk onInternational Law and State Building in Historical Perspective: The Mandate System of the League of NationsbyProfessor Antony Anghie, Professor of International Law, Utah UniversityTime: 11 amDate: 13 March 2008 (THURSDAY)Venue: SIS, Conference Room (203 – Second Floor)

Centre for the Study of Law and Governance, Jawaharlal Nehru University, Seminar Series

David T. Johnson, Professor of Sociology and Adjunct Professor of Law, University of Hawaii

The Next Frontier: National Development, Political Change, and the Death Penalty in Asia

Over the last three decades, the number of countries in the world to abolish capital punishment has tripled, and some regions of the world, such as Europe and Latin America, are now almost death penalty free zones. In this context, Asia has become the regional capital of capital punishment, the site of more than 90% of all the judicial executions in the world. But death penalty policy and practice is changing in Asia too. This talk, based on a forthcoming book with the same title, describes and explains how capital punishment is changing in Asia and explores some possible death penalty futures in Asia generally and in India specifically.

Dr Rinku Lamba, at present is a Max Weber Postdoctoral Fellow at the European University Institute in Florence, Italy. She completed her doctorate in Political Theory at the University of Toronto. Prior to that Dr Lamba obtained her Masters' degrees in political science from the University of Oxford, and from Jawaharlal Nehru University. Her main areas of interest are in contemporary political theory, particularly the doctrines of secularism and multiculturalism. She has worked on institutional arrangements for the political accommodation of claims advanced by members of religious and cultural minorities within liberal-democratic jurisdictions. Through her research she seeks to weave a productive dialogue between postcolonial theorists and liberal-democratic theorists so as to gain insights for appropriate mechanisms for coping with the domination-related conundrum that attaches to the accommodation of religious and cultural claims. Her work straddles across the disiciplines of political theory, law and history. Aside from being well trained in western political thought, she also has a strong interest in modern Indian social and political thought, and in cross-cultural ethics.

Dr. Prabha Kotiswaran is a lecturer at the School of Law at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. She has an S.J.D. and LL.M. from Harvard Law School and a B.A., LL.B. (Hons.) from the National Law School of India University, Bangalore, India.

Roopa Madhav, currently a Research Fellow at IELRC, holds an LLM from New York University and a BA/LLB from National Law School of India University , Bangalore. She has been a visiting faculty at the National Law School, has worked with trade unions and was the President and Founder Member of the Alternative Law Forum, Bangalore. Her research interests include labour law, environmental law and human rights.

Kalpana Kannabiran is Professor of Sociology at NALSAR University of Law, Hyderabad, India and founder member of a women's collective, Asmita Resource Centre for Women where she coordinates research and legal outreach for women. She was Chair of RC32 (Women in Society) of the International Sociological Association from 2002-2006 and General Secretary of the Indian Association for Women’s Studies in1998-2000. Her areas of specialisation are Sociology of Law, Jurisprudence and Gender Studies. She received the Rockefeller Humanist in Residence Fellowship at Hunter college, CUNY 1992-1993 and VKRV Rao Award for Social Science Research in the field Social Aspects of Law in 2003 from the Indian Council for Social Science Research and the Institute of Social and Economic Change. A contributor to the Economic and Political Weekly and The Hindu, she has co-authored a volume of essays, De-Eroticizing Assault: Essays on Modesty, Honour and Power (Stree, Calcutta, 2002), co-edited Muvalur Ramamirthammal's Web of Deceit: Devadasi Reform in Colonial India (Kali for Women, New Delhi, 2003), edited The Violence of Normal Times: Essays on Women's Lived Realities (Women Unlimited in association with Kali for Women, Delhi, 2005); co-edited The Situated Politics of Belonging (London: Sage, 2006). She is also a contributor to the Routledge International Encyclopaedia on Women and the History of Science, Philosophy and Culture in Indian Civilisation, Volume IX Part 3 (New Delhi: Sage, 2005). Most recently, she has co-edited, Challenging the Rule(s) of Law: Essays on Colonialism, Criminology and Human Rights, Sage, New Delhi, forthcoming 2008. Kalpana was a Member of the Expert Group on the Equal Opportunities Commission, Ministry of Minority Affairs, Government of India in 2007-2008.

Pearson G 2003 'The pregnant preposition and the definite and indefinite article: Sections 82 and 87 of the TPA damages for the whole or the part of the loss', Competition and Consumer Law Journal, vol.11:2, pp. 163-186.

Pratap Bhanu Mehta, is the President and Chief Executive, Centre for Policy Research, New Delhi.

Expertise:

Governance, Political Theory, Constitutional Law and Political Economy

Education:

B.A.(Philosophy, Politics and Economics) from Oxford University and Ph.D. in Politics from Princeton University.

Background:

He was previously Visiting Professor of Government at Harvard University and Associate Professor of Government and of Social Studies at Harvard. He was also Professor of Philosophy and Law and Governance, JNU. He has published widely in reputed national and international journals in a variety of fields including, political philosophy, intellectual history, constitutional law, international politics, society and politics in India. His most recent book are "The Burdens of Democracy" and "Public Institutions in India: Performance and Design". He has been a prolific contributor to public debates and his columns have regularly appeared in The New Republic, Foreign Policy, The Hindu, Indian Express, Telegraph, Yale Global, and numerous other papers. He has served as Editorial Consultant to the Indian Express. He is co-editor of The Oxford Companion to Politics in India (forthcoming), and serves on the editorial board of numerous journals. He has lectured widely in universities in the United States, Britain, New Zealand, Europe and Japan.

Current Research:

Mehta's current research projects center around four themes. The first is understanding India's Great Transformation, the profound social, political and economic changes of the last two decades, and the trajectory they are likely to take in the future. This will result in a book. The second project looks at the role of law in Indian society. It will specifically focus on the justiciability of social and economic rights, and whether judicial intervention is a good means of achieving those objectives. This project will result in a series of papers. The third project - a collaborative project-related to the first two is on Globalization and the Indian State, that looks at the legitimacy challenges facing the Indian State in an era of globalization. The fourth project continues Mehta's long standing interest in philosophical ethics and explores what it means to lead an examined life. In addition Mehta will continue to perform the role of loyal opposition and engage the public and government through columns on topical issues.

Lavanya Rajamani is an Associate Professor at the Centre for Policy Research in New Delhi. She is an international lawyer specializing in environment law and policy. She was previously University Lecturer in Environmental Law and Fellow and Director of Studies in Law at Queens' College, Cambridge. She has a B.C.L and D.Phil. from Oxford where she was a Rhodes Scholar, and an LL.M from Yale.

Rajamani has authored a Monograph on Differential Treatment in International Environmental Law (OUP, 2006) and numerous articles in peer-reviewed journals including the Yearbook of International Environmental Law and the Journal of Environmental Law. In her current research she is exploring ways of further integrating developing countries into international environmental regimes, in particular the climate change regime, and studying national laws and policies in select developing countries (Brazil, China and India) implementing international climate change law. She is also writing a book provisionally titled International Environmental Law in Indian Courts: the Vanishing Line between Rhetoric and Law.

Rajamani has been invited to serve as Director of Studies for the 2008 research session on Implementation of International Environmental Law at the Hague Academy of International Law. She works as a consultant to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change Secretariat, and has worked with the UNDP, the World Bank, the Alliance of Small Island States, and the International Institute of Sustainable Development. She is associated with the Yale Centre for Environmental Law and Policy, and serves on the editorial board of the Review of European Community and International Environmental Law.

Prabhu Mohapatra teaches history at the University of Delhi. His special interest is in Economic and Social History of Modern India, Migration and Diaspora history and Labour History . His current work centres around the long term pattern of Regulation of Labour relations and labour market in India. In which he explores the entrenchment and enforcement of Contractual relations in India specially in the Labour market and the workplace. Some of his published essays dealing with Law and labour relations are as follows.

1)( Forthcoming)" From Status to Contract: Or How Law shaped Labour Relations in Colonial India" in Jan Breman etal (ed) Debt Bondage in India

Alexander Fischer teaches public law and comparative constitutional law at the School of Law, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. He was a Visiting Fellow (2004/2005) at the Centre for Law and Governance, JNU, New Delhi and taught at the South Asia Institute of the University of Heidelberg before shifting to London. Research interests: Constitutional and Comparative Constitutional Law, Constitutional Theory, Federalism, Law and Courts, Law and Politics, Laws of South Asia

Siddharth Narrain is a legal researcher at The Alternative Law Forum, Bangalore. His areas of interest include, sexuality rights, media laws and judicial decisions related to socio-economic rights in India. Mr Narrain has worked s a journalist for Frontline Magazine and The Hindu newspaper in New Delhi, writing extensively on socio-legal and human rights issues. He graduated from the National Law School of India University, Bangalore and the Asian College of Journalism, Chennai.

Publications: Articles and Essays"Toward the Next Generation of Galanter-Influenced Scholars: The Reach of a Law-and-Society Founder." Law and Contemporary Problems (forthcoming 2008). With Stewart Macaulay.

"Scholarly Discourse and the Cementing of Norms: The Case of the Indian Supreme Court and a Plea for Research." 9 Journal of Appellate Practice and Process, (forthcoming 2008). Click here for full draft text on SSRN.

"Outsourcing and the Globalizing Legal Profession," 48 William and Mary Law Review 2189 (2007). Click here for a full draft text on SSRN. Full text on Lexis and Westlaw.

"Analyzing the Friedman Thesis through a Legal Lens," 81Tulane Law Review 923 (2007). Full text on Lexis and Westlaw.

“Lawyering for a Cause and Experiences from Abroad,” 94 California Law Review 575 (2006). Click here for full draft text on SSRN. Full text on Lexis and Westlaw.

“Transgressive Cause Lawyering in the Developing World: The Case of India,” in The Worlds Cause Lawyers Make: Structure and Agency in Legal Practice (eds., Austin Sarat and Stuart Scheingold, Stanford University Press, 2005).

“From the ALI to the ILI: The Efforts to Export an American Legal Institution,” 38 Vanderbilt Journal of Transnational Law 1255 (2005). Click here for full draft text on SSRN. Full text on Lexis and Westlaw.

“Professor Kingsfield Goes to Delhi: American Academics, the Ford Foundation, and the Development of Legal Education in India,” 46 American Journal of Legal History 447 (2004). Full text on Westlaw. Click here for full draft text on SSRN.

"Bread for the Poor: Access to Justice and the Rights of the Needy in India,” 55 Hastings Law Journal 789 (2004). With Marc Galanter. Full text on Lexis and Westlaw. Full text on SSRN.

"India's Patriot Act: POTA and the Impact on Civil Liberties in the World’s Largest Democracy," 22 Law and Inequality 265 (2004). Full text on Lexis and Westlaw.

"Mobilizing Immigrants," 11 George Mason Law Review 695 (2003). Full text on Westlaw.

"The Rights of the New Untouchables: A Constitutional Analysis of HIV Jurisprudence in India" 25 Human Rights Quarterly 791 (2003). Full text on SSRN.

"Social Policy Advocacy and the Role of the Courts in India." 21 The American Asian Review 91 (2003). Full text on SSRN.

"Debased Informalism," in Beyond Common Knowledge: Empirical Approaches to the Rule of Law (eds. Thomas Heller & Erik Jensen, Stanford University Press, 2003). With Marc Galanter.

“So Help Me God: A Comparative Study of Religious Interest Group Litigation." 30 Georgia Journal of International and Comparative Law 233 (2002). With K. den Dulk. Full text on Lexis and Westlaw.

"Perceptions and Interpretations of Law from Past to Present in the Subcontinent." 34 George Washington International Law Review 639 (2002). Full text on Lexis and Westlaw.

"Public Interest Litigation in a Comparative Context." 20 Buffalo Public Interest Law Journal 19 (2001-2002). Full text on Lexis and Westlaw.

"Personal Law and Human Rights in India and Israel." 34 Israel Law Review 101 (2000). With M. Galanter. Full text on Lexis.

Education University of Michigan, Ph.D. August 1999, Interdepartmental Program in Anthropology and HistoryAwards and Fellowships*NEH Fellowship [calendar year 2004]*Charter Fellowship in the Humanities and Social Sciences, Oxford University. *NEH Summer Stipend, June 1-July 31, 2001.*Postdoctoral Fellow, Sawyer Seminar “The Production of the Past: History in the Making,” Columbia University, September 1999-May 2000*Fellow, International Institute, University of Michigan, Advanced Study Seminar on “Violence and Ethics.” *Rackham Predoctoral Dissertation Grant, University of Michigan, 1997-1998*Rackham Dissertation/Thesis Grant and Hewlett International Dissertation Grant, University of Michigan, 1996 *American Institute of Indian Studies Junior Research Fellowship, January 1996- December 1996*Social Science Research Council/ACLS International Dissertation Award *Andrew W. Mellon Fellowship in the Humanities (1992-1997)

Gender and Caste: Contemporary Issues in Indian Feminism, for a series on Indian feminism, guest editor Rajeswari Sunder Rajan, New Delhi: Kali for Women, 2003 (hardback). Paperback published Spring 2005 in India; co-published internationally by Zed Books, Summer 2005.

Violence, Vulnerability, and Embodiment: A Gender and History Reader. London: Blackwells, Summer 2005.

Journal Special IssuesCo-editor with Shani D’Cruze, “Violence, Vulnerability, and Embodiment,” a special issue of Gender and History, Volume 16, Number 3, November 2004.

Essays in Edited Volumes and Special Issues“Who is the Dalit? The Emergence of a New Political Subject,” in a festschrift in honor of Eleanor Zelliot, Oxford University Press (forthcoming winter 2007).

“Ambedkar and the Politics of Minority: A Reading,” in From the Colonial to the Postcolonial: India and Pakistan in Transition, eds. Dipesh Chakrabarty, Rochona Mazumdar and Andrew Sartori, Oxford University Press, 2007.

“Dalit Selfhood and Problem of Representation,” Seminar special issue on “Dalit Perspectives,” February 2006.

“Sexuality, and the Family-Form,” in a symposium on Marriage, Sexuality, and Community, Economic and Political Weekly, Vol. XL, No. 8, February 19, 2005: 715-718.

“Testifying to Violence: Gujarat as a State of Exception?” in Elizabeth Castelli and Janet Jakobsen eds. Interventions: Activists and Academics Respond to Violence. (New York: Palgrave and MacMillan, 2004.

Jinee Lokaneeta is an Assistant Professor in Political Science at DrewUniversity, Madison, New Jersey.Jinee's research is on Torture inContemporary Liberal Democracies focusing on the United States and India..Her areas of interest include Public Law, Jurisprudence, CivilLiberties, Political Theory (Postcolonial, Feminist and Marxist theory)and Cultural Studies.

Sally Engle Merry is Professor of Anthropology and of Law and Society at New York University. Her work explores the role of law in urban life in the US, in the colonizing process, and in contemporary transnationalism. She is currently doing a comparative, transnational study of human rights and gender. She was previously on the faculty of Wellesley College, where she was the Marion Butler McLean Professor in the History of Ideas and Professor of Anthropology. Her recent books are Colonizing Hawai’i: The Cultural Power of Law (Princeton Univ. Press, 2000), which received the 2001 J. Willard Hurst Prize from the Law and Society Association, Human Rights and Gender Violence: Translating International Law into Local Justice (University of Chicago Press, 2006), and The Practice of Human Rights: Tracking Law between the Local and the Global, (co-edited with Mark Goodale; Cambridge University Press, 2007). She has authored or edited four other books: Law and Empire in the Pacific: Hawai’i and Fiji (co-edited with Donald Brenneis, School of American Research Press, 2004), The Possibility of Popular Justice: A Case Study of American Community Mediation (co-edited with Neal Milner, Univ. of Michigan Press, 1993), Getting Justice and Getting Even: Legal Consciousness among Working Class Americans (University of Chicago Press, 1990), and Urban Danger: Life in a Neighborhood of Strangers (Temple University Press, 1981). She has recently published articles on women's human rights, violence against women, and the process of localizing human rights. She is past-president of the Law and Society Association and the Association for Political and Legal Anthropology and currently a member of the Executive Boards of the American Anthropological Association and the Law and Society Association.

Submitted PhD thesis to the University of Calcutta, July 2007 Topic: “Gendered Construction on Culture of Silence/Insignificant Articulation” Completed Masters in Sociology from CSSS, JNU in 2000Completed Graduation in Sociology from Presidency College, Kolkata in 1998

Academic Experiences• Presently working as Lecturer in Sociology at The West Bengal National University of Juridical Sciences, Kolkata since December 2004. Offering LLB Optional courses on Disability and Law and Law, Culture and Pluralism besides co-teaching Sociology of Law and an LLM course on Law and Social Change • Visiting Faculty at the M Phil course on Women’s Studies in the Women’s Studies Research Centre at the University of Calcutta teaching a module on Feminist Methodology since July 2005. • Resource person at the Administrative Training Institute, Kolkata training government officials on various human rights related issues since 2007Papers Presented • Presented a paper on Laws relating to Sexual Harassment of Women in Workplaces at the JD Birla Institute, Department of Home Science and Commerce in a Seminar on Emerging issues to Empower Women in October, 2007• Presented a paper jointly with Prof Ved Kumari of the University of Delhi on Image of Family in Women’s Narratives and its interface with Family Law Curriculum at NUJS in August, 2007• Presented a paper on Silenced Voices in Women’s Autobiographies organized by the Women’s Studies Unit, JNU, Delhi in April, 2007• Presented a paper on Women and Partition Narratives: Experiences, Emotions and Expectations at a National Workshop on Women’s Histories, Women’s Narratives commemorating Lila Majumdar’s Birth Centenary, organized by Jadavpur University, School of Women’s Studies in March 2007• Presented a paper on Democracy and Gender in a national seminar on Democracy and Democratization organized by Jadavpur University, International Relations Department under the UGC-ASIHSS programme in March 2007• Presented a paper on Silenced Women, Talking Women: Women Narrating Conflict at the All India Women’s Studies (Eastern Region) Conference in February, 2007• Presented a paper on Integrating Sociology in Law School Curriculum: Discontent, Dilemma, Direction in a Workshop on Mapping Practices in Sociology and Thinking the Role of Social Sciences in India at JNU in January 2007• Presented a paper on Courtroom Dramas: Juxtaposition of ‘Objective’ Truths and Empathetic Listening? at the XXXIInd All India Conference of the Indian Sociological Society in Chennai, December 2006• Presented a paper on Women, Violence and Human Rights in a panel discussion on Status of Women in India at Gokhale Memorial College, Kolkata in December 2006• Presented a paper on Analysis of the Domestic Violence Act, 2006 in a panel discussion on Protection of Women from Domestic Violence Act organized by Jadavpur University Women’s Studies Department in December 2006• Presented a paper Law’s Perception of Sexuality: Morality vs. Objectivity on the Closing Plenary of the IVth International Congress on Folk Law and Legal Pluralism held at the University of Indonesia, Jakarta In June 2006• Presented a paper at the annual International SHARP Conference on Women’s Personal Narratives: Creating Women’s History at Jadavpur University in January 2006• Presented a paper on Sociological Insight into Women’s Lives in the Private Sphere at the All India Women’s Conference Seminar on Personal Laws and Women’s Rights: The Indian Experience in January 2006• Presented a paper on Sociology in Law Schools: An Emerging Pedagogy at the All India Sociological Conference at Jaipur organized by the Rajasthan Sociological Association in December 2005. • Presented a paper on the Background and Existing Provisions of the Bengal Vagrancy Act, 1943 as a part of a Workshop on Bengal Vagrancy Act, 1943: Recommendations for Change organized by the Centre for Women and Law, The WB National University of Juridical Sciences and Action Aid International—India, in November 2005.• Given a Faculty Seminar at NUJS on Laws and Women’s Lives—an unbridgeable fissure? Bengali Women’s Autobiographies and Social Reform Legislations in the 19th century in August 2005.• Given a Faculty Seminar at NUJS on Sociology, Criminal Law and Social Order: An Interdisciplinary Perspective in January 2004.• Presented a paper entitled “A Sociological Approach to the legal principles dealing with Persons with Disabilities” at a Seminar on Socialisation of Women with Disabilities, organized by Calcutta University, Women’s Research Centre and Action Aid, India on 5th December 2003.• Presented a paper “Uniform Civil Code and Gender Just Laws” at a Seminar on “The Different Personal Laws in India” organized by State Commission for Women and National Commission for Women in association with National University of Juridical Sciences at NUJS on the 15th of March 2003.

Involved in a number of training programmes as resource person on issues related to women’s rights, rights of persons with disabilities and child rights

Active member of a women’s rights group in the city, Nari Nirjatan Pratirodh Mancha (Forum for Oppression against Women) and Maitri, a women’s network of NGOs and women activists in West Bengal

09/03/08

Lecturer, University of Kent Law School Prior to the PhD Brenna practiced law briefly in Canada. Her reseach interests lie in the areas of indigenous rights, post-colonial and critical legal theories, theories of recognition, and property law. Her current research is in the area of biotechnological forms of property and processes of propertisation.

Previously, Associate to Judge of the Federal Court of Australia, 1994-5, Lecturer in Law, University of Adelaide, South Australia, 1997; Legal Officer, Aboriginal Legal Rights Movement, South Australia, 1998; Lecturer in Public Law and Regulation, Lancaster University, 2003; joined Kent Law School in 2004.

RESEARCH INTERESTS Sovereignty, Postcolonial theory, indigenous land rights and self-determination, law and war, social movements, globalization, theories of democracy, political philosophy.

Refereed PublicationsEdited BookS. Motha (ed.) (2007) Democracy’s Empire: Sovereignty, Law and Violence (Blackwell, London). ISBN: 9781405163132 Also published as a Special Issue of the Journal of Law and Society, (2007) Vol: 34/1 pp. 1-161, ISSN: 0263-323X.

Peter Fitzpatrick is currently Anniversary Professor of Law at Birkbeck, University of London, Honorary Professor of Law in the University of Kent, and Visiting Fellow in the Institute of Advanced Studies, University of Warwick. In 2007 he was awarded the James Boyd White Prize by The Association for the Study of Law, Culture and the Humanities. He has taught at universities in Europe, North America and Papua New Guinea and published many books on legal philosophy, law and social theory, law and racism, and imperialism, the most recent one being Modernism and the Grounds of Law (Cambridge). Outside the academy he has been in an international legal practice and was also in the Prime Minister’s Office in Papua New Guinea for several years.

Department of Anthropology (m\c 027) University of Illinois at Chicago

Education: 1970 PhD Harvard University 1958 MA University of London, School of Oriental & African Studies 1955 BA Cornell University

Major Academic Positions:

2002-present Professor Emerita of Anthropology, University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) 1970-2002 Assistant, Associate & Professor of Anthropology, UIC 1965-69 Assistant Professor of Anthropology, California State College at Hayward

Major Fellowships and Grants (since 1998):

2005-06 American Institute of Indian Studies Senior Research Fellowship 2001 (Fall) American Institute of Indian Studies Senior Research Fellowship 2000 (April) British Academy Visiting Professorship, Institute for Commonwealth Studies, London 1999-00 UIC Institute for the Humanities Fellowship 1998-99 U.S. Department of Education, Fulbright-Hays Senior Research Fellowship

Publications:

Book:

1972 Kinship and Urbanization: White Collar Migrants in North India. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.

Articles (since 1990)

In Press “Summary of the Developments in Hindu, Muslim and Other Laws Related to Marriage, from 1771 to the Present.” Encyclopedia of Women in World History. New York: Oxford University Press. In press “Islamic Feminism in India? Indian Muslim Women Activists and the Reform of Muslim Person Law.” Special Issue, F. Osella and C. Osella, eds., Modern Asian Studies 42. In Press “A Rallying Cry for Muslim Personal Law: The Shah Bano Case and its Aftermath.” IN Islam in India in Practice, Barbara Metcalf, ed. Princeton: Princeton University Press. 2008 “Divorce at the Wife’s Initiative in Muslim Personal Law: What are the Options and What are Their Implications for Women’s Welfare?” IN Redefining Family Law in India: Essays in Honour of B. Sivaramayya, pp. 200-235. Archana Parashar & Amita Dhanda, eds. London and New Delhi: Routledge. 2007 “The ‘Cancer of Dowry’ in Indian Muslim Marriages: Themes in the Popular Rhetoric from the South Indian Muslim Press.” IN Living With Secularism: The Destiny of India's Muslims, Mushirul Hasan, ed. pp. 155-176. New Delhi: Manohar Publishers and Distributors. 2006 “Bharattee’s Death: Domestic Slave-Women in Nineteenth-Century Madras.” IN Slavery and South Asian History, Indrani Chatterjee & Richard Eaton, eds. pp. 210-233. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. 2006 “Domestic Violence and Marital Breakdown in India: A View from the Family Courts.” IN Culture, Power, and Agency: Gender in Indian Ethnography, Lina Fruzzetti & Sirpa Tenhunen, eds. pp. 204-226. Calcutta: Stree. 2005 “Moving the Courts: Muslim women and Personal Law.” IN The Diversity of Muslim Women’s Lives in India. Zoya Hasan & Ritu Menon, eds. pp. 18-58. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press.

2005 “Muslim Women and Personal Law” IN In a Minority: Essays on Muslim Women in India. Zoya Hasan & Ritu Menon, eds. pp. 18-68. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. 2004 “Hamara Daur-i Hayat: An Indian Muslim Woman Writes her Life.” IN Telling Lives in India: Biography, Autobiography, and the Life History. David Arnold and Stuart Blackburn, eds. pp. 144-174. New Delhi: Permanent Black and Bloomington: Indiana University Press. 2004 “‘The Family’: A Contested Concept in Early-Nineteenth-Century Madras.” IN Unfamiliar Relations: Family and History in South Asia, Indrani Chatterjee, ed. Pp. 161-191. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press and Delhi: Permanent Black. 2003 “Muslim Women in the Indian Family Courts: A Report from Chennai.” IN Divorce and Remarriage among Muslims in India, I. Ahmad, ed. Pp. 137-160. New Delhi: Manohar 2003 “Credit System (Women's Private Banking in Rural India).” IN South Asian Folklore: An Encyclopedia, P. J. Claus and M. A. Mills, eds. P. 130. New York: Garland Publishing, Inc. 2002 “Older Women, Past and Present, in an Indian Muslim Family.” IN Thinking Social Science in India: Essays in Honour of Alice Thorner, S. Patel. J. Bagchi and K. Raj, eds. Pp. 247-263. New Delhi: Sage Publications. 2001 “‘Where Will She Go? What Will She Do?’ Paternalism Toward Women in the Administration of Muslim Personal Law in Contemporary India.” IN Religion and Personal Law in Secular India: A Call to Judgment, G. J. Larson, ed. Pp. 226-238. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. 2000 “Epilogue.” IN Culture, Creation and Procreation: Concepts of Kinship in South Asian Practice, A. Rao and M. Bock, eds. Pp. 357-366. London: Berghahn.

1999 “Shurreef, Herklots, Crooke, and Qanoon-e-Islam: Constructing an Ethnography of 'the Moosulmans of India'.” South Asia Research 19:5-28. 1999 “Family Biographies as Sources for an Historical Anthropology of Muslim Women's Lives in Nineteenth-Century South India.” IN The Resources of History: Tradition, Narration and Nation in South Asia, J. Assayag, ed. Études Thematiques 8:153-172. Paris and Pondichery: Écôle française d'Extrême Orient and Institut français de Pondichery 1996 “Migration and the Elderly.” IN Meeting the Challenges of Ageing Populations in the Developing World, J. Calleja, ed., Proceedings of an Experts' Group Meeting, 23-25 October 1995, pp. 85-99. Valleta: United Nations International Institute on Ageing. 1996 “The Art of Dying in Hindu India.” IN Facing Death: Where Culture, Religion, and Medicine Meet, H. M. Spiro, M. G. M. Curnen, and L. P. Wandel, eds. Pp. 121-128. New Haven: Yale University Press. 1996 “Identity and Difference or Equality and Inequality in South Asian Muslim Society.” IN Caste Today, C. Fuller, ed. Pp. 227-262. Delhi: Oxford University Press. 1995 “The Indian Woman in Later Life: Some Social and Cultural Considerations.” IN Women's Health in India, M. Das Gupta, T. N. Krishnan and L. C. Chen, eds. Pp. 289-306. Delhi and New York: Oxford University Press. 1994 “Schooling for What? The Cultural and Social Context of Women's Education in a South Indian Muslim Family.” IN Women, Education, and Family Structure in India, C. C. Mukhopadhyay and S. Seymour, eds. Pp. 135-164. Boulder: Westview Press. 1992 “Forms of Address in North India: The Family Domain.” IN Concepts of Person, 2nd ed., A. Ostor, S. Barnett, and L. Fruzzetti, eds. Pp. 56-98. New Delhi: Oxford University Press.

1992 “Sexuality and the Middle-Aged Woman in South Asia.” IN In Her Prime: New Views of Middle-Aged Women, 2nd rev. ed., V. Kerns and J. K. Brown, eds. Pp. 155-170. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press. 1990 "’To Be a Burden on Others’: Dependency Anxiety among the Elderly in India.” IN Divine Passions: The Social Construction of Emotion in India, O. M. Lynch, ed. Pp. 64-88. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. 1990 “The Cultural Construction of Shared Identity: A South Indian Muslim Family History.” IN P. Werbner, ed., Person, Myth and Society in South Asian Islam. Special Issue, Social Analysis 28:114-131.

In the 1960s, Tony Blacksheild was a lecturer, and later a senior lecturer, in the Department of Jurisprudence and International Law at the University of Sydney, where he worked with Julius Stone (and Upendra Baxi). In the 1970s he was one of the original founding faculty members at the newly-established Law School at the University of New South Wales, where he became an Associate Professor. In the 1980s he was Professor of Legal Studies in the interdisiplinary School of Social Sciences at La Trobe University, in Melbourne. In the 1990s he was Professor of Law at Macquarie University, Sydney. He retired in 1999. He is the co-author (together with George Williams) of the leading casebook on Australian constitutional law: Australian Constitutional Law & Theory: Commentary and Materials (4th edition 2006). In 1966 he was a Ford Foundation Fellow at the Indian Law Institute, where he was recognised as an honorary professor. His article on amendment of the Fundamental Rights, published in (1966) 8 Journal of the Indian Law Institute 139, was used in argument in Golak Nath v State of Punjab, AIR 1967 SC 1643.

Roshan de Silva-Wijeyeratne, School of Law, Griffith University, Brisbane, Queensland, Australia - r.desilva@griffith.edu.au to the Law and Social Sciences Research Network. Roshan joined the Law School from the University of East London (UK) in 2001. He graduated from the School of Oriental and African Studies in the University of London in 1990 and completed his London LLM in 1992. He received his doctorate from the University of Kent in Canterbury in 1999. His research interests lie in the field of law and social theory, with particular reference to the relationship between law, colonialism, and the postcolonial, and he has published articles in Social and Legal Studies, Law/Text/Culture, the Griffith Law Review, and Social Identites. He has published a number of articles on the relationship between Buddhism, law and identity in Sri Lanka using phenomenological, deconstructive and psychoanalytical perspectives. In 2003 he finished co-editing a special issue of the Griffith Law Review on Tracking the Postcolonial in Law. He has been asked to write entries on Sri Lanka and Buddhist Law in South Asia for the Oxford Encyclopaedia of Legal History. In addition he is currently working on a book on Constitutionalism and Buddhism in Sri Lanka, and is also working on a book proposal with John Strawson (of the University of East London, U.K) on Postcolonial Legality.

Since 1997 Roshan has also undertaken two major consultancies with leading law firms in London. Between 1997-2000 he was commissioned to write a report on Sri Lanka in relation to a shipping arbitration. In addition in 1999 he was asked to provide a country report on Sri Lanka to a London law firm in relation to an Asian Development Bank project. He is also an active participant in debates about peace process in Sri Lanka and in 2006 attended a conference in Zurich sponsored by the Berghoff Foundation. To this end Roshan has also a number of journalistic pieces on the peace process in Sri Lanka for papers in both Sri Lanka and the U.K.

Current Research: Roshan is currently contracted with Routledge for a book on Nation, Constitutionalism and Buddhism in Sri Lanka. Roshan is also working on a journal article on Islam and community.

Shrimoyee Nandini Ghosh graduated from the National Law School, Bangalore, and has a M.Res (Masters in Research ) from Birkbeck College. She worked at the Majlis Legal centre as a practising lawyer, between 2003 and 2005, litigating on issues of conjugality, sexuality and women's economic rights and has been working as an independent human rights lawyer/researcher in Delhi since 2006.

Arun Thiruvengadam is an Assistant Professor at the Faculty of Law, NationalUniversity of Singapore. He obtained his formal legal education from theNational Law School, Bangalore (B.A., LL.B (Hons.), 1995; LL.M, 2001) and NewYork University School of Law (LL.M, 2002, J.S.D., 2007). After completing hisundergraduate education in 1995, he served as a law clerk to Chief Justice A.M.Ahmadi at the Supreme Court of India for eighteen months. Between 1997 and 1999,he practiced in the fields of administrative, constitutional and commercial lawbefore the High Court of Delhi and the Supreme Court of India. He has been aResearch and Teaching Fellow at the National Law School (1999-2001), as well asat the Global Public Service Law Project at NYU School of Law (2003-05).

The areas in which he has research and teaching interests are: comparativeconstitutional theory and practice; Constitutional and administrative law inIndia; law and development; and legal education. In recent years, he haspresented academic papers at conferences/seminars at the following venues: theFaculty of Law, McGill University; the School of Oriental and African Studies,University of London; and at the Faculties of law at the Universities ofIndonesia, Hong Kong, Toronto and Kyushu. In 2007, he undertook stints asVisiting Professor twice, and taught intensive courses on constitutional theoryand Indian constitutionalism at the National University of Juridical Sciences,Kolkata and at the Faculty of Law, University of Toronto

Srimati Basu is an Associate Professor of Gender & Women's Studies at the University of Kentucky, Lexington KY, USA. My research interests are in gender and law, governance, property and violence against women. Her publications include 'She Comes to Take her Rights: Indian Women, Property and Propriety' (SUNY Press, 1999) and 'Issues in Indian Feminism: Dowry and Inheritance' (Women Unlimited, 2005).

Sundhya Pahuja is an Associate Professor at the Law School, University of Melbourne and the Co-Director of the Law and Development research Programme at the Institute for International Law and the Humanities. Her research focuses on Public International Law, International Economic Law, Development and legal theory, including postcolonial, political-economic and post-structural theory.

Carolyn Penfold is a Senior Lecturer in the Faculty of Law at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia. Carolyn currently teaches and researches in labour law, and is particularly interested in the effects on labour law of globalisation and the growth of the services economy. Carolyn has bachelor degrees in Arts (politics) and Law from the Australian National University, and Masters degrees in Education and Law from the University of New South Wales.

Rubya Mehdi is associate Research Professor at Carsten Niebuhr Institute University of Copenhagen. Her field of research is Islamic law and South Asia. Dr Mehdi has written several articles and books. Central books on the issue "Islamization of Laws in Pakistan" Curzen Press and "Gender and Property law in Pakistan" DJØF Publishing Copenhagen.

Julia Eckert is Associate Professor at the Max Planck Institute forSocial Anthropology, Halle/Saale, Germany where she heads the researchgroup ‘Law against the State’ which examines the juridification ofprotest and the globalisation of transnational legal norms. Her researchinterests are in legal anthropology, conflict theory, the anthropologyof the modern state, and the anthropology of security. She is currentlywriting a book on the police in Bombay focusing on everyday conflictsover norms of justice, citizenship and authority. Among her publicationson this research are "The Trimurti of the State" in: Sociologus 2005;"From Subject to Citizen: Legalism from Below and the Homogenisation ofthe Legal Sphere" in: Journal of Legal Pluralism, 2006. Her work on aHindu-nationalist movement in India resulted in her book "The Charismaof Direct Action" (Oxford University Press, 2003). Other than India, sheconducted research in Uzbekistan and Afghanistan. She was a researcherat the German Institute for international pedagogical research,Frankfurt am Main, and lecturer at the Humboldt University, Berlin andthe Free University of Berlin from where she holds a PhD.

Dolly Kikon grew up in Nagaland, India. She briefly practiced law in India(2000 - 2002), before obtaining an MPhil in social science from HongKong University of Science and Technology in 2004. She has worked as ahuman rights activist and a researcher in the past. Her researchinterests include, human rights, the indigenous question, propertyregimes, and citizenship. Currently she is a PhD student at theDepartment of Anthropology at Stanford University.

Philippe Cullet is a Reader in Law at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) where he teaches environmental law and intellectual property. He is also the Managing Director of the International Environmental Law Research Centre (IELRC) and the Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Law, Environment and Development (LEAD-journal.org), a peer-reviewed online journal available at www.lead-journal.org.He studied law at the University of Geneva and King's College London (LLM), development studies at SOAS (MA) and went on to receive his doctoral degree in international environmental law from Stanford Law School, Stanford University. He is the author of Differential Treatment in International Environmental Law (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003), Intellectual Property and Sustainable Development (New Delhi: Butterworths, 2005), and the editor of The Sardar Sarovar Dam Project: Selected Documents (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007). He is currently writing a book entitled Water, Law and Development in the context of Water Sector Reforms in India (forthcoming 2009).

Nandan Nawn has completed his masters and M.Phil from CESP, JNU.He joined NUJS in 2001. He teaches two compulsorypapers on economics. The first one is on principles ofeconomics (mainly microeconomics) and the second oneon problems of Indian economy with additional moduleson basic macroeconomics and international trade. Healso offer two optional courses on Law and Economics,and Ecology, Policy and Law.

Sangha Padhy is a Candidate for Ph. D. in Political Science at the University of Southern California. She is specialized in Public Law, Comparative Politics, Human Rights, Environmental Policy, and Asian Studies, with an emphasis on research and teaching. Her research and teaching interests in Political Science build on interdisciplinary and qualitative studies. She has been a teaching assistant at University of Southern California for courses in Law and Public Policy, International Law and Human Rights; she has led discussions and lectured on Environmental Human Rights. She has taught undergraduate Political Science courses as a lecturer at Gargi College, Delhi University in India. She has recently worked as a researcher and writer on democracy and human rights issues in Asia at Taiwan Foundation for Democracy and Judicial Reform Foundation in Taiwan. Her publications include From Green Bench to Green Courts: Executive and Judicial Battles over Environment and Secularism and Justice: A Case Study of Indian Supreme Court Judgments, published in leading Indian journals and presented at American Political Science Association, Mid-West and Law and Society Association.

Bronwen Morgan is Professor of Socio-legal Studies at the University of Bristol, UK. She was previously Harold Woods Research Fellow in Law at the Centre for Socio-legal Studies and Wadham College, University of Oxford (2002-2005), and Tutorial Fellow and University Lecturer in Law at St Hilda's College, Oxford (1999-2001). She holds a Ph.D. (2000) from the Jurisprudence and Social Policy Department at the University of California at Berkeley and a law degree (1991) and B.A. in English and French Literature (1988) from the University of Sydney, Australia. Her research focuses on the political economy of regulatory reform, the intersection between regulation and social and economic human rights, and global governance. Her 2003 monograph Social Citizenship in the Shadow of Competition was awarded the Hart Socio-Legal Prize for Early Career Academics in 2004. The book traces the ways in which economic rationality increasingly shapes both regulatory governance and collective identity, using Australian regulatory reform policy as a case study. Her current research explores globalised struggles over socio-economic rights that revolve around axes of conflict between national and local control, and between market efficiency and human rights. She recently completed a project focusing on private sector participation in water delivery to households, its consequences and the patterns of social protest it generates in six different national contexts. Recent publications appear in Social and Legal Studies, the Journal of Consumer Policy, the European Journal of International Law and edited volumes including Making Global Self-Regulation Effective in Developing Countries ( eds Brown and Woods, Oxford University Press 2007); Consumption and Citizenship (ed Trentmann and Soper, Palgrave 2007); Governance and Consumption: Agency and Resistance (eds Bevir and Trentmann, Palgrave 2007), Public Accountability, (ed. Michael Dowdle, Cambridge University Press 2006) and Institutions and Public Law: Comparative Approaches (eds. Tom Ginsburg and Robert Kagan, Peter Lang 2005).

LASSnet

THE IDEA OF LASSnet

The Centre for the Study of Law and Governance [Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi] initiated the establishment of the "Law and Social Sciences Research Network" in order to bring together scholars, lawyers and doctoral researchers engaged in research and teaching of issues of law in different social sciences in contemporary South Asian contexts. We believed that the critical work that has emerged from different institutional locations and theoretical frameworks, has yet to find a common forum which can act as a medium for exchange of ideas, work, materials, pedagogies and aspirations for the way law, regulation and society as objects of research as well as sites of praxis have been envisaged variously. The attempt of this network is to create a forum for academics, researchers, and lawyers to interact with each other to find productive conversations with each other as well as enhance these conversations into future directions that law and social sciences scholarship in India might mature into.

LASSnet, anchored at CSLG, seeks to organise a network conference every 2-3 years, collaborate on specific themes with institutions in South Asia, especially, take the idea of publishing a series of volumes on these themes seriously as well as initiating reading groups/work in progress meetings.

We also wish to disseminate teaching materials, design syllabi and share pedagogic experiences.

So far we have organised 3 network conferences in Delhi and Pune in India and one conference in Sri Lanka. We run a LASSnet Delhi Chapter which meets once in two months allowing researchers to present their ongoing work. We have also started a reading group, LASS Readings.

We would be delighted if you were to send us names and emails of those you think might want to join this network. We hope that people will also share their work, and ideas.

CSLG also has a library that has put together important texts on law and social science scholarship. This network could use the archives at CSLG meaningfully as well as enhance it. If you would like to be part of LASSnet, please send your contact details and short bio to lassnet@gmail.com

LAW AND SOCIAL SCIENCES IN SOUTH ASIA

Inaugural Conference

was held on

January 9-11, 2009

at

Centre for the Study of Law and Governance,

Jawaharlal Nehru University

New Delhi, India

We began by noting that law is conventionally taught and practiced, in South Asia (though not only there) by treating it as an autonomous and self-sufficient phenomenon. The doctrinal researchers regard law as autonomous and believe it is capable of giving an account of itself. The law also tends to be narrowly conceived as what judges, legislators, or the police ‘do’ – ignoring the diffuse structures of power and governance, and practices of regulation, normalisation, and biopolitics that penetrate bodies and condition behaviour.

The notion that law is autonomous (legal formalism or legal positivism) has been subjected to sustained challenge over many decades by scholars who draw on social science methodologies, as well as by the law and literature movement, and by activists who constantly challenge the positivist image of law. Broadly conceived, these scholars seek to explain law as a social, anthropological, historical, and economic artefact which should be understood and studied as such. This implies also that we trace the genealogies of categories which inform law, and the images and imaginings of law in contemporary social science theory. All this suggests that the law is not confined to state law or the appellate judiciary. Not only it remains a fact that state law remains inherently plural; it interacts with plural regimes of customariness. We wish to understand how forms of state and non-state law mutually constitute each other and how they relate to different structures of power and techniques of violence.

Methods and techniques drawn from the social sciences are central to understanding the market, legal structures, regulation and statecraft in the era of globalisation. In mapping the field of law and social sciences, we interrogate the place of law and economics in the larger context of the scripting of the transformation of legal and regulatory regimes. We recognise that while regulation has emerged as a field in conversation with the discipline of economics, there is very little work which details the intersection of regulation with law. Moreover, the conversations between regulators and lawyers do not seem to be informed by social science frameworks and methodologies. The Law and Social Sciences Network (LASS) reflects the interests of those scholars who wish to engage with interdisciplinary research on the transformation of legal and regulatory regimes from varying empirical and theoretical viewpoints.

LASS recognises that much scholarship informed by the social sciences in South Asia has been engaged with social movements and forms of activism which have challenged law’s power to deny, censor, hurt, humiliate and kill. The engagement with this politics of hurt has led to many passionate debates about the place of law in our work and in our politics. Yet in South Asia, the research, teaching and practice of law that draws on the social sciences has been relegated to the margins, and radical activist engagement with law devalued by official discourses of judicial reform. LASS invites reflexive engagements from scholars and activists about the relationship between law and social movements.

The Law and Social Sciences Network (LASS) was constituted to map the field of Law and Social Sciences in South Asia. Its objective is to bring together academics, lawyers and researchers engaged in innovative legal research in South Asia which employs social science methodologies. Building on existing conversations, LASS hopes to stimulate the development of further research into the links between knowledge production, techniques of government, and the ever transforming interdependencies of power, law, and resistance. LASS promotes an examination of how law and/or regulation is constituted as an object of study, and an interrogation of the conditions of its truth claims.

LASS may or may not necessarily inhabit the intellectual and political zones of comfort or of distress created by the habitus of postmodern jurisprudence. We invite critical engagement with the global travels of mainstream networks of Law and Economics, Law and Society or Critical Legal Studies, by providing a sustained critique of the fascination of progressive Eurocentric scholarship for South Asian law, economy and society studies.

LASS may equally turn its attention to the precious and precocious critiques of the “dark side of [European] modernity” which rarely attend to the histories of colonization and the Cold War as these have affected South Asia

We remain sensitive to the fact that the very expression ‘South Asia’ embodies forms of epistemic geopolitical imperialism. LASS remains particularly anxious concerning this essentialization of identity and by the same token resists its translation into an “area studies”. Further, it needs saying that some new geopolitics is now in the making. LASS thus calls for an appreciation of the histories of diversity and plurality, within which inescapably new traditions of law/society/humanities tradition of discourse may be further re-imagined. What purchase this may constitute for the tradition of the distinctive European post-Enlightenment critical legal studies tradition is an important thematic inviting further dialogical/discursive fellowships of juristic learning.

These methodological challenges are suggested with a view to inviting their further elaboration. Contributors should be mindful of these methodological concerns as they address issues in the following more specific settings. In particular, papers, panels, and presentations were invited on:

1. CONSTITUTIONALISM, REFORM AND RESISTANCE

· Constitutionalism, rights and regulation. Has the discourse on constitutionalism met new challenges in relation to changing statecraft, international law, or human rights in South Asia? How does regulation intersect with rights discourses? How do pictures of the written and unwritten scripts of constitutional law circulate in different sites of law and life?

· Languages of Power and of Resistance. What literary and visual representations of the law and resistance to law exist in the South Asian region? In what ways, the 'poetics' tend to subvert politics? Herein we signal the problematic of the multiplicity of the official languages and the politics of translation. How does the politics of resistance constitute the fields of law, creativity and collective action? What are the trajectories that turn the public domain inside out and force new sensibilities and new paradigms that foreground a different understanding of “justice”?

· The politics of law and judicial reform. What is the politics of law and judicial reform? How are histories of such reform to be archived and evaluated? How do different forms of representations [such as the media or those emanating from social movements] engage with projects of law reform? Do contemporary engagements with reform and resistance benefit with tracing the genealogy of categories, and discursive shifts which create new forms of subjection and subjectivities?

· Colonial and Postcolonial Imaginations of the Law: The challenges by legal historians and postcolonial theorists in thinking through law and social forms have led to a rich body of literature on law and society in South Asian contexts. We invite contributions interrogating colonial as well as neo-imperial formations of law, governance, and regulation. This panel retains an interest in the contestations on law’s past as these relate to the constitution of the nation-state, and reflections on the impact of history in the reconstitution of law as an object of study.

2. THE BODY, TECHNIQUES OF GOVERNANCE AND REGULATORY POWER

· The practices of governance in relation to environment, health and sexuality. What are the processes of govermentality which sanitise, medicalise or pathologise some forms of life? What form of regulatory power inhabits the constitution of waste and how does it participate in the formation of public aesthetics? How is the body encountered in public or administrative law? Is gender/sexual orientation/disability a site of recognition that allows us to critique the manifold elisions in the body of the law?

· Technology, Life and the Law. The relationship between science, technology, the body and resources are mediated by the state-corporation alliances in a globalised era. What are the ways in which we may interrogate the deployment of technology to control bodies and life forms, and the regulation of both life and technology through law?

· Technosciences, Environment, Risk and Regulation: How have human rights and social movement discourses pursued this relationship? What images of a ‘risk society’ remain constitutionally legitimate? Are these ideas revisited in the context of the environmental contemporary discourses, such as the global discourse on climate change?

3. PROPERTY, LABOUR, DISPLACEMENT

· Property in different domains of law and life. What are the new challenges faced today in thinking through property rights and discourses? What are some new forms of property emerging through new phases of economic reform? What futures one may envisage for agrarian reforms? What kinds if new property stand invested, particularly in relation to the changing regimes of intellectual property rights in South Asia?

· Labour rights, livelihoods and mass displacement of peoples in contemporary contexts of globalisation. What is the relationship between law and regimes of impoverishment in South Asia? In particular, how may globalization affect constitutionally mandated visions of development as most benefiting the worst-off peoples? As concerns worker’s rights, what legacies may we derive from the histories and narratives of working class movements in South Asia? How may we ‘read’ these alongside with the globalization–induced programs aimed at creation of ‘flexible labour markets’?

4. VIOLENCE AND SUFFERING

· Social suffering and political violence. This has multiple dimensions not fully exhausted by the figure of the detainee, torture and disappearance; forms of collective violence and atrocities in everyday and collective contexts; and the modalities of capital punishment and custodial violence have elicited critical research. How is the everyday conceptualised in these contexts? Beyond, and related to this, remains the question of the reproduction of foundational violence of the law. This emerges of course in the context of India-Pakistan partition; yet it also emerges equally fiercely, for example, in Afghanistan, the erstwhile Tibet, and Burma. This conference invites full attention to the postcolonial ‘nacropolitics’ (to deploy here the phrase-regime of Mbembe).

· Terror, Law and Biopolitics: What is the relation between terror, law and bio-politics? Or what would constitute the jurisprudence of emergency or exception in South Asia today? Put another way, we need to explore fully the law-society relationship between the pre and post 9/11 forms of wars of, and wars against ‘terror.’ How may have the South Asian studies tradition, at all, addressed ‘terror?’

· Movements of autonomy and secession: The South Asian experience remains marked by constitutional and ‘extra’-constitutional insurgencies. How has the construction of the political been conceptualized and narrated in law and society studies tradition in the ‘region?’ How does militarization of protest and of governance proceed to reproduce new forms of ‘bare life?’

Instructions for Submission of Papers

The Steering Group particularly welcomed the submission of pre-formed panel proposals. Individual proposals were welcome, as were proposals for full panels. Papers were also considered on any related theme.

500 word abstracts weresubmitted no later than 15th June, 2008. 500 word abstracts were submitted to Pratiksha Baxi at lassnet@gmail.com; abstracts were in Word, WordPerfect, or RTF formats, following this order: author(s), affiliation, email address, title of abstract, body of abstract. We got back to you within 8 weeks. If an abstract was accepted for the conference, a full draft paper was submitted to the conference secretariat and distributed to the discussant and fellow panel members no later than 01 December 2008.

The maximum duration of individual presentations within each panel was 20 minutes. The abstracts are hosted at http://www.lassnet.org/